Google Slap
Thursday, 27 July 2006
Ken McCarthy, John Reese and several other marketeers are reporting the phenomenon known as GoogleSlap. This is the GoogleDance of Adwords, where cost-per-click has risen markedly for sites which offer “suboptimal” experience for users. Apparently any attempts at lead-generation now costs $1 per click, vs. $0.20 in the past.
Anik Singal, in Surviving Google Update of July 2006, reports four kinds of sites which were hardest hit.
- One page/long form sales letter
- Squeeze pages, in exchange for a free report
- AdSense arbitrage
- Affiliate sites
and suggests among other things,
moving the landing page to a site with a high page rank;
increasing the number of words on landing page (at the expense of conversion rates!);
using another sites’ url (sneaky! read Anik’s article)
I wonder how this compares with pay per action ads that Google is introducing? In my opinion, Microsoft wouldn’t have been able to get away with this, since Microsoft would have been required to give competitors equal access to their services. It won’t be long before the Google Anti-Trust action takes off.
The comments section lists more resources and commentary from other adwords advertisers. Some are planning to take their businesses elsewhere. Surprisingly, no one is taking this to the Trade Practices Commission.
Interestingly, Amit Argawal points that Google is hiring telecommuters to work as adwords relevance quality raters. I’m not sure what kinds of qualifications these people have. It is impossible for someone without a particular need to rate adword landing sites. For instance, showing Swee the landing pages I’m excited about sends her into an absolute yawn.
No. 1 — August 21st, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Chui, great post!! This Google slap thing has been killing me.
Thanks for sharing this information. Keep it coming.
If you want to dig a little deeper into this Slap phenomenom visit my friends page at http://www.golfedup.com/thegoogleslapfix.html
He has some very intereseting information Mr. X, of the Adwords Blackbook fame, is releasing.
Geez, its getting harder and harder to keep up with the Google algorithm changes.
Good luck and keep on truckin Chui!
No. 2 — October 7th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Link above is spam
No. 3 — November 30th, 2007 at 10:22 am
I’ve been trying to figure out the slap details and considering gettin ppcriches..but i know the info is out there..
No. 4 — December 31st, 2007 at 11:12 pm
I just wrote a longish article about this under the title of “More thoughts on the Google Slap, no follow and a Slap Back” .. basically, because I fear Google can misinterpret anything, I made ALL outgoing links “nofollow”.
That’s extreme, but Google kicked me from a PR6 to a PR3, and that’s pretty extreme itself.. since Google won’t tell us how it decides if a link is organic or not, I’ll just play safe..
But: if everyone started doing this out of fear, it would destroy Googles PR algorithm.. hurting all of us and Google.. so my method is NOT good..
What’s the answer?
No. 5 — February 7th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Google is changing its algorithm so much these days, but the main plus features for advertisers remain the same, use good original content, and quality of incoming links.